Rocking chairs provided with a locking mechanism for preventing rocking movements while a person attempts to rise from the chair or to sit thereon have been known since many years. Generally, the chair comprises a fixed base, a seat rockably mounted to the base, and a locking mechanism mounting to the chair for selectively immobilizing the seat relatively to the base.
Locking mechanism comes in two flavours: manually operated and automatic. Examples of rocking chairs equipped with a manually operated locking mechanism are described in the U.S. Pat. No. 6,120,094, issued to Parent on Sep. 19, 2000 and entitled “Rocking Chair with Automatic Locking Device”, and in the U.S. Pat. No. 6,213,551, entitled “Chair Locking Mechanism”, issued to Desnoyers et al. on Apr. 10, 2001.
A drawback of such rocking chairs is that the lever of the locking mechanism may be difficult to operate for people having hand or forearm disability problems and for people with reduced mobility.
Bouchard et al., in the U.S. Pat. No. 6,406,095, issued on Jun. 18, 2002 and entitled “Self-Locking Mechanism” propose a solution to the above-mentioned drawback in the form of a locking mechanism intended to be automatically actuated while the occupant is still assuming a normal sitting position. The proposed locking mechanism comprises a detector for establishing whether a person is sitting on the chair, a lock, and an actuator for unlocking the lock when the presence of the person on the chair has been detected. The detector is responsive to pressure onto the backrest of the chair.
A first drawback of Bouchard's self-locking mechanism is the important number of its components and its complexity, yielding a mechanism bound to malfunction and an overall chair expensive to manufacture. A second drawback is that Bouchard's self-locking mechanism is uncomfortable and difficult to operate.